IISD 26 February 2013: The UN Statistical Commission held a seminar on “Big Data for Policy, Development and Official Statistics,” which examined how the Internet, mobile devices and other technologies, such as sensor networks, have fundamentally changed the nature of data.

Big data has the potential to change the ways in which National Statistical Offices (NSOs) use data, especially as more quality and timely statistics become available. Big data differs from “traditional” data by its real time nature, as well as by speed, type and volume. The speed at which new data is created by a range of sources means that there have been large increases in the volume of data, in addition to shifts from a highly structured, centralized and easily managed nature to a loosely structured, highly distributed manner.